Conditional markets are those that are resolved to N/A if some other stuff doesn't happen (If Trump run and the major networks calls him to have lost, will he win when they count the votes in Congress?).
The problem with those markets is that it consumes a lot of Mana. For certain markets, when the odds of the market ever being resolved are very low (If Russia uses nukes in Ukraine, will the US join the war?), Manifold participants have low incentives to make the probabilities correct.
This market will resolve to YES if by the end of 23, Manifold tried to alleviate the situation with some first class citizen feature.
Related questions
One thing I wonder about these markets is, would they still work if the community adopted a norm of resolving them to PROB instead? The downsides I can see is that for low-probability conditionals, it becomes much more of an unconnected contest to game the percentage than anything connected to fundamentals. But maybe some of you clever folks have better ideas about it?
@MP Well, given that the resolver is choosing some specific percentage, there's a lot of options. The simplest one is to resolve to the percentage of the market at close - this has the advantage of being both unambiguous and uncomplicated, but it seems gameable.
My comment was asking if some clever folks had a better scheme for choosing the probability that would allow these markets to function on the underlying question, while still allowing people to get paid on lower-probability conditionals.
I think instead multi-choice fixed payout markets will address this need.
The way I would envision is like this.
Market A has 3% of being resolved to YES with M10,000 of volume
Market B is only resolved if A is resolved
Market participants should be allowed to bet in B with only a fraction of the Mana defined by f(3%) and if the volume in B is considerably lower than A (therefore participants in B can't game A to make margin calls in B).
So let's say f(x)=3x
If I want to bet M100 in the market B, I need:
-M9 posted when I initiate my position
-M200 of Mana in other markets.
Then say that a black swan happen and A suddenly happens. Then I'll have some time to post the entirety of the 100 I need. If I don't, Manifold sells proportionally across all my holdings and posts the Mana. Ultimately, Manifold can make participants whole if all of this doesn't work.
A key difference to this to how it would work in financial markets is that Manifold isn't correlated. So if you a big black swan (Taiwan invasion), and then this doesn't change my holdings in the next doctor Market.
The ability to combine conditional markets into one market and bet the same M$ on all possibilities would be a great feature
Would it help if the market creator stated that payout would be PROB, xx% if condition 1, yy% if condition 2, 100% if both? I'm not sure how it affects the dynamics but could be interesting.
Also, lots of conditional markets should be be just go away - many are poorly worded or just not thought out clearly first.
